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Thursday, May 8, 2008

how can it be so hard to draw Joe Pesci

I can’t believe I’m having so much trouble with drawing Joe Pesci (the young actor of 1980), since his features are really quite distinct. I’ve always thought it would be easy, but wanting to do a caricatured cartoon version of him I failed totally and decided to just go with something vaguely resembling this great Scorsese-actor and try some facial expressions straight out of a movie.

The inspirational screenshots were from Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980), one of the films that get better every time you watch them. It’s the shot-reverse shot scene in the second half, where Jake (De Niro) gets upset about Joey kissing Jake’s wife on the mouth.

Isn’t the guy in the middle looking more like Edward G. Robinson?

Right now it seems I even managed to tone it down… what John K would call an “underture”. I tried to fiddle with proportions and started out with a smaller cranium but on every subsequent drawing it grew back into normal size…

I’ll be coming back to Bull and Pesci. There are lots of fascinating DeNiro scenes as well and besides these two actors were in a couple of great films together. I hope to come to the point where I’m actually able to invent original expressions only possible in animation. But until then I work on copying and (hopefully) exaggerating expressions I see in movies and newspapers.